JavaScript coders targeting Firefox can now test their apps with free tools that started life serving the developers on Microsoft's once mighty Internet Explorer.
dynaTrace Software has released AJAX Edition 3 that adds support for Firefox 3.6 and 4.0 to its AJAX performance management tool.
Earlier versions had only tested …

Missing words...

It possibly should have read "A major thing that has held devs back on IE has been a lack of [standards based] HTML support in the browser from Microsoft"

As for IE being the market leader, That in large part is down to the fact that's it's bundled with the market leading OS. Note; market leader != the best! To be fair, when IE6 was released it was a cracking product, however it lingered too long.

So...

Is this a good thing?

I expect it is, I'm using Firebug myself, an excellent tool. I will give this dynaTrace software a go. To be honest I never heard of it, thanks for bringing this to my attention.

"Andreas Grabner said that most IE sites are suffering in terms of development and functionality because devs have switched to Firefox or are going to Google's Chrome."

That's understandable, it is easier to write standards compliant code and then bend the code to work in IE rather than coding to IE standards and then having to bend to code to suit more standards compliant browsers. However, is there such a thing as an IE site? And if there is, should there be? I always thought a website was standards compliant or not.

"a very hard core [of companies] are still clinging to IE6 and IE7"

There's a reason for that.

They don't want to spend large amounts of money testing and deploying something which their software may be incompatible with, nor do they want to spend lots of money upgrading the software itself, when it works perfectly well without deploying a newer browser.

Spend a few million quid to "upgrade" to exactly where you were before but with a newer version of IE?

Why would you do that - especially, if like my company, the browser is mainly used internally?